If I know someone who I think is sensible, and they hired someone to do some work on something that they know nothing about, and the thing was fixed and has kept working for a good amount of time, that is useful information.
What is your proposed solution to deal with this perceived problem? Hire another expert to judge the work (how do you know to trust that expert)? Be an expert in everything yourself?
This is a good enough bar for me to take a chance on someone. If I'm satisfied with the result... I proceed. My "car guy" has a track record of saving me from over-spending on things that don't matter. I don't have a good enough reason to try someone else.
There's a infinite regression in your logic that can only be broken by either:
1. trust in the person, or somewhere along the chain of referrals or;
2. simply possessing the skill and knowledge to assess the work yourself (but lacking the time, energy, or other resources to do it yourself)
> 2. simply possessing the skill and knowledge to assess the work yourself (but lacking the time, energy, or other resources to do it yourself)
Yes, that was the point.
Heck, businesses will sue you if you put bad feedback on glassdoor.
I've even been offered 2 months salary by a business to NOT disparage their (toxic) culture on social media.
I trust people I know more than I trust machines that can be manipulated by people I don't know.
If someone gives you a bad recommendation, you make a mental note not to take recommendations from that person in the future.
It's how things have been done for the last 5,000 years.
Never move from your home community.
Like, in the US at least, most licensed professionals are not catastrophically bad at their jobs and you can probably get by with slightly worse contractors and lawyers for most day-to-day issues, for a couple years, while you get integrated into the local community. Especially in areas that you actually want to move to, which tend to have large populations of problem who’ve moved there recently and so are well organized to integrate them.
Some cultures have been very destructive when they've moved into new places, others have learnt to live in harmony with the natural environment.
And, it's new environments that provide us with new problems to try to sollve, and that's probably the most interesting thing in the universe.
Without moving to places where I have no pre-existing social support structures I would never know that the problem exists, nor how brittle the current solution (asking people for their experiences) is.
Lead to ideas of (certain-to-fail) locals-only review websites (that might even enlist folks to do potentially-compensated exit interviews with diners leaving restaurants).
Whenever we hire someone, a restaurant to cook our meal, a lawyer to help settle our house purchase, a plumber to fix the leaky pipe, we almost never know what we are buying into.
So e ask people that have previously had someone do those jobs for them.
And here's the rub, they have no idea whatsoever on the quality of the person being hired, only that they've not NOTICED any poor results.
I've highlighted noticed, because, unless the person you ask is qualified to assess the work, they have no idea on is quality.
And this affects us all, because we use references to guide us on people to hire for jobs, and we have no idea on the quality of the person providing the reference.
Do we ask for a reference on the person giving the reference? Even if we do, do e get a reference on the person giving the reference for the person giving the reference?